My Bitcoin Journey

Image compliments of Gemini

Like many I caught wind of Bitcoin early in 2014 and it caught me. I understood the technology side of the Blockchain because globally redundant clustering was part of my professional wheelhouse. What I did not understand at the time was the implications for money. Andreas Antonopoulos was one of the prominent Bitcoin speakers and evangelists at the time and I soaked up his rebellious messages like a dry sponge.

Like many then I was still living with fallout from the 2008 financial meltdown, so the message that money was broken was landing on an open mind. I bought some, my investment yielded returns, I am not an investor and had less than a passing familiarity with the practice. So I took some of my earnings and signed up to a course offered mostly to bankers, 1300 people around the world would participate in online sessions of several weeks and discuss
“Crypto,” most were bankers, some nerds like me.

I learned that I had a fleeting grasp of finance, I also learned that bankers had little understanding of what Bitcoin was and the long term implications. This was still early in the Bitcoin evolution 2017, The ethereum DAO had collapsed a few months earlier and ICO’s were catching the ire of Elizabeth Warren and Jamie Dimon. That also told me this was a serious threat, and if it was serious then I should be paying careful attention because something was going to happen.

What I Learned

Just by Paying Attention

The money that we use everyday, the same money that the whole world is impacted by every day, is not fair or equitable, it favors a few in the investor class over the many who are wage earners. I didn’t learn this from Andreas although he put words to the message, I lived it. Bitcoin confirmed to me that money was broken, and when Lyn Alden published her book “Broken Money” it landed like a fart in church, exposing the chili eaters from last night’s social . You could smell the smoke, it was not a pleasant understanding that we have been dependent on a system over earners. that was designed from the start to favor investors

What’s worse was that there was no choice, I could not vote to change what was the swamp we were all swimming in. Banks supported the broken money, governments depended on it, wars were fought and people died in large part because of the design that favored extraction over collaboration and coordination. A system that favored a short timeframe over a longer savings mindset.

In 2017 Bitcoin was still a niche player, only a few intelligent people could grasp the long term implications, long term thinkers like those in China. In September 2017, China banned Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and ordered all domestic cryptocurrency exchanges to shut down. This forced major crypto giants (like Binance and Huobi) to flee the country and set up offshore servers. Sovereign money, the dollar, yuan, pound, your basic fiat currency is above all else (medium of exchange, unit of account) a means of control. China tightened that noose with a national CBDC Central Bank Digital Currency, which is still a hard sell even in China.

In June of 2019 I was feeling like the 2008 crisis was behind me. Compliments of Private equity, one of those institutions that extracts wealth from companies at the expense of the working class I was laid off in July. After the initial shock I remembered that for most of my professional life I had been an independent sole proprietor, technology consultant and the jolt turned into a sigh of relief. Nobody was holding the strings to my livelihood any more. I was once again solely responsible for my family’s economic future.

Being Responsible

Being In Control

I have a friend, he is one of those people that the technology help desk dreads. You know the guy that calls up with a panic because his computer screen is blank and having pressed the on button it remains unresponsive. After 10 minutes of letting him vent frustration and disdain for technology’s encroachment on humanity, they ask him to check if the computer is plugged in. Blaming the cat he thanks them and apologizes for the inconvenience.

Because he is a friend, when he asked me about Bitcoin and the blockchain I did not tell him my wife was urgently calling for me. I sat and made my best effort to explain what I understood. What clicked with him was, “money the government can’t control.” He still didn’t understand blockchain, and being the technical wizard he was, he probed deeper. I explained cryptography and how it was linked to the expenditure of energy in the blockchain proof of work. Combined, they make the system unhackable because it’s a combination lock; no nation state or rogue actor can crack it.

I doubt he was fully cognizant of the full technical underpinnings, and I am certain he was not going to study blockchain and cryptography as I had, but because we were close friends, he trusted that I trusted the system enough to hold my Bitcoin. Getting him set up with a Bitcoin wallet was another adventure altogether.

The point is that he understood the important part, taking personal responsibility for your money apart from a government, bank, or any other third party is the most responsible thing we can do. It’s an exit from a system that was designed with no exit door.

I was following the Bitcoin Journey of Fidelity from 2014 since my employment pension was managed by them, in 2019 they opened Fidelity Digital Assets , the obvious question in my mind was why would a large institution like Fidelity get involved in a financial technology that Elizabeth Warren and Jamie Dimon demonized? Something didn’t smell right, sure enough in the next few years, institutions who were a few years earlier dismissing Bitcoin as “magic internet nerd money” were starting to understand. Like Satoshi Nakamoto the creator of Bitcoin said in one of his early posts “you may want to get some, it might just catch on” or something to that effect. Now banks, got it, Michael Saylor got it, El Salvador got it, and the general public was starting to get it despite Elizabeth and Jamie’s hand waving about terrorism and pedophilia.

It is moving from being a legitimate exit from the broken system for anyone anywhere who has the awareness to being a store of value recognized by kings, kingdoms and empires . Not so much a plan as an evolution. Changes in currency take decades, in January of 2027 Bitcoin will be 18 years old, it is a store of value, is a unit of account and a medium of exchange by an increasing number of users. Time will tell if the inevitably of energy money based on math created to serve the market instead of the investor class will catch on but I am optimistic. In the long run the cards, so to speak, are stacked in its favor.

Bots can’t get a bank account, and Agentic AI is ripping through the business landscape like a California wild fire, with no slow down in sight, soon digital money that cannot be changed (because bots like certainty) will become the defacto standard for business and markets.

Trust is easily broken and hard to repair, the last 10 years has been a string of broken trust by the country that for too long has dictated economic policy for the world. That trust is on the precipice of a global collapse.

Money is more than a thing, it is the collective trust that we capture our labor into. It is the water that we all swim in. The system we are leaving our children in is in shambles; it breaks their hopes and dreams, it shackles them, history tells us, it is the seeds of rebellion. If we change the money, possibly we can change the world, and we should start with the children.

I have started a series of books, a children’s story, a fable, a fantasy, designed to plant the seeds I have been cultivating for years. If money is broken, what comes next? Each child’s story book (50+ pages) has a complimentary adult book (100+ pages), they are designed so you can have an intelligent conversation with your children, one our parents never had with us because there was no alternative, no escape, only surrender.

I have published 2 and have 6 more in the works. If you want a copy of the pre-release, click here. They are also available on request in bookstores and libraries on request. The series is called “The Things We Call Money.”

Your children will have questions, mine do! you should have answers.